President
Donald Trump with Russia's ambassador to the US, Sergei
Kislyak.Russian
Embassy

National security experts reacted with alarm Monday night to
reports that President Donald Trump disclosed classified
information to Russia's foreign minister and ambassador to the US
during a meeting in the Oval Office last week.

"This story is nauseating," Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow in
Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, posted on Twitter
along with a link to The Washington Post's bombshell story. "You
might have to work with natsec," or national security, "people to
understand how bad it is, but it's horrible. Really really bad."

The Post reported on Monday night that Trump's disclosures to
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergei
Kislyak "jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the
Islamic State" and "had been provided by a US partner through an
intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that
details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted
even within the US government."

Many have noted that Trump, as president, is legally allowed to
essentially disclose classified information to whomever he wants.
But the fact that the information he shared was not a US secret,
but that of an American ally, may complicate his authority to
declassify information at will. Matthew Rosenberg of The New York
Times told
CNN on Monday that the intel came from a close "Middle
Eastern ally."

"This is appalling," said Eliot Cohen, a
professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced
International Studies and former counsel to Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice. "If accidental, it would be a firing offense
for anyone else. If deliberate, it would be treason."

"It's so mind-boggling, I don't even know what to say," Eric
Edelman, who served as undersecretary of defense during the
George W. Bush administration, told The Wall Street
Journal. "I'm completely gobsmacked. It's jeopardizing a
human source. It's the one thing you're trained to never do. If
what Post is reporting is true, it's a stunning indication of his
unfitness for office."

"This is the most serious charge ever made against a sitting
president of the United States," Harvard professor and
constitutional law scholar Alan Dershowitz
said.

'This is not a garden variety breach'

Lawfare, a website
founded and managed by national security experts and former
members of the US intelligence community, published its initial
reaction to The Post's story shortly after it broke.

"This is perhaps the gravest allegation of presidential
misconduct in the scandal-ridden four months of the Trump
administration," the authors, including former National Security
Agency lawyer Susan Hennessey, wrote on Monday.

"This is not a garden variety breach, and outrage over it is not
partisan hypocrisy about protecting classified information," they
continued. "The information allegedly disclosed here appears to
be of an extremely sensitive nature," as evidenced by top White
House officials' reported attempts to "contain the potential
fallout" from Trump's misstep by quickly contacting the directors
of the CIA and the NSA.

Trump
and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.Thomson Reuters

Trump "revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than
we have shared with our own allies," one official told The Post.
The incident happened last Wednesday,
one day after Trump fired the FBI director, James Comey, amid
an FBI investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded
with Russian officials to undermine Hillary Clinton in the 2016
election.

Trump's national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, told reporters
on Monday night that The Post's reporting was "false" and that
Trump did not disclose the "methods and sources" of US
intelligence with the Russians during their meeting.

But Trump appeared to confirm
on Tuesday morning that he had shared information with the
Russians.

"As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly
scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do,
facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety," Trump
tweeted."Humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia
to greatly step up their fight against ISIS &
terrorism."

Lawfare said Trump's reported actions "may well be a violation of
the President's oath of office."

The authors explained:

"Questions of criminality aside, we turn to the far more
significant issues: If the President gave this information away
through carelessness or neglect, he has arguably breached his
oath of office ... In taking the oath President Trump swore to
'faithfully execute the Office of President of the United
States' and to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution
of the United States' to the best of his ability. It's very
hard to argue that carelessly giving away highly sensitive
material to an adversary foreign power constitutes a faithful
execution of the office of President."

Jim Jeffrey, a former US ambassador who served as deputy national
security adviser in the George W. Bush administration, told
Business Insider the report would be more concerning if Trump had
shared those intelligence sources and methods with the Russians.
But he cautioned that "the ally who provided the info will have
to be told, and that could restrict future reporting" of
sensitive intelligence between the partners.

Jeremy Bash, the former Pentagon chief of staff under President
Barack Obama, echoed that sentiment: "Giving the Russians
intelligence that our counterterrorism partners have asked us to
protect is incredibly dangerous," he told
The Wall Street Journal. "It will ensure that those partners
don't share with us the information we need to protect
ourselves."

Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell told
CBS on Monday night that Trump's disclosures are
"highly damaging, for two reasons: First, the Russians will
undoubtedly try to figure out the source or the method of this
information to make sure that it is not also collecting on their
activities in Syria -- and in trying to do that they could well
disrupt the source."

"The second damage is that countries who provide the United
States with intelligence information will now have pause to do so
if the United States is sharing such information with the
Russians without their permission," Morell added.

Additionally, Jeffrey said, "whatever the president shared with
the Russians beyond the absolute minimum raises the specter that
he doesn't get how justifiably outraged Americans are at the
hacking of the 2016 election. That's the most troubling."